Berlin By The Sea

A cherished moment of this past Berlinale week happened away from Potsdamer Platz, in the dark belly of silent green. To get to the Forum Expanded exhibition An Atypical Orbit, I walked down a long ramp, its bottom guarded by Tenzin Phuntsog’s video installation Dreams. As I crossed the threshold underneath a projection of Phuntsog’s parents going to sleep in an empty room, I too entered a different state. The physical tension, a byproduct of my inability never not to think about the next thing on the above ground schedule, ebbed away, at least a little. I savoured a taste of what cinema can be, even if it shouldn’t always be that: both slumber and heightened awareness, refuge and intensification (connect this to death – silent green was built in 1909 as a crematorium – and I’m much less terrified of the prospect).

At festivals, I am consistently drawn to films with long shots and carefully assembled soundscapes: in Gent it was Apichatpong Weeresethakul’s Memoria; last year in Berlin it was Miryam Charles’s This House; this year, Phuntsog’s installations. Under different circumstances, I often crave action, romance, a heist, a road movie. At times, I even get annoyed with slowness, suspecting that a movie is too locked down in its mode, not wrestling with the fact that the world isn’t really designed for contemplation. But at festivals, thrust into non-stop movement on and off-screen, I apparently want nothing more than to sink into stasis, be held by a visual poem.

And so this final project is less about moving images than it is about stills, little drawings I made during workshops, breaks, waiting periods, sometimes even while watching a movie, in lieu of proper notes. Drawing busies the hand, but it is also a refuge from movement: it demands sitting down, looking up and around. Unlike a text, lines cannot be edited after the fact, which means they disclose mishaps, moments of hesitation, rashness. I see in these drawings moments of excitement, anxiety, a bad night’s sleep, moments of quietude.

In the ‘Betonhalle’ at silent green, two other works by Tenzin Phuntsog were on display, among them Pala Amala, a two-channel installation. On the left, his parents sit on a stool in a small room, almost devoid of furniture but filled with warm sunlight. They caress each other slowly, two people truly at ease with each other. On the right, Phuntsog’s mother and father are at the beach, soft waves arrive and depart from the shore. It occurred to me that I know this beach, jumped into the water right there a few weeks ago to feel the tickling cold all over my body. In this moment, I felt a great longing: to be by the water, but also to be absorbed by the film. The image and the ocean merged, both keeping the balance between motion and stillness – as a drawing does too and as I will keep trying, at Berlinale and elsewhere.